Best Of
Re: Bodhisattvas?
I see them as an ideal to work towards even if practically its out of reach for us.
I think its also important to understand what a bodhisattva is. Its more than a very compassionate person, there is also an element of awakening involved.
person
Re: The Plant Medicine Path
ive often wrestled with going caffeine free. so many conflicting theories....its good for you...its bad for you....
Sitting with uncertainty
Just a little reflection. The idea of sitting with uncertainty in Buddhism is a pretty central tenet. From the Buddha refusing to answer certain metaphysical questions on the ground that they're unproductive to the practice and can cause one to get stuck in them, to the Kalama sutta. Nagarjuna's emptiness saying all views eventually undermine themselves. Zen's "don't know mind" and emptying the cup. To everyday meditation practice letting go of mental arisings.
The thing that gave rise to the thought was how its a pretty common disposition for people to be uncomfortable with uncertainty, to have a need to collapse down into a definitive position. My thought was that for me at this point in my practice, is that certainty is the uncomfortable position to be in. Its like living with blinders on, refusing to look behind me at what I'm not seeing. Its not that nothing I see or believe is real, its more that the feeling of "I've got this figured out" means I've stopped looking and am missing something.
person
Re: The AI tsunami
What stuck out to me was that some of these people seem like stable, well adjusted people. I can see in myself that it gets appealing talking to an AI. But the things that seem to pull me back is that kind of Narcissus sense that its just reflecting back me at me rather than a real interaction and the occasional hallucination. Hallucinations just remind me that it doesn't really understand, its more a super sophisticated auto complete.
person
Re: The AI tsunami
From Daring Fireball:
CLAUDE CAN NOW TAKE CONTROL OF YOUR MAC ★
Claude:
In Claude Cowork and Claude Code, you can now enable Claude to use your computer to complete tasks. When Claude doesn’t have access to the tools it needs, it will point, click, and navigate what’s on your screen to perform the task itself. It can open files, use the browser, and run dev tools automatically — with no setup required.
This feature is now available in research preview for Claude Pro and Max subscribers. It works especially well with Dispatch, which lets you assign Claude tasks from your phone.
Interesting that Anthropic ships this for Mac before Apple. But yeah, software agents are getting real, and in-depth personal assistants won’t be far behind.
I caught the news on so-called Companion AIs becoming popular to the point that kids coming home from school go tell their chatbot about their day before they tell their parents. These are chat bots which are trained to prioritise forming an emotional bond with a human user. Scary stuff.
Jeroen
Re: The AI tsunami
Yes, I agree, there are certain times where its contribution can become less and it’s more like an echo chamber. I found it’s best to start conversations with a fresh page with Claude quite frequently, and then to initially use short open questions to get it to contribute as much wide ranging material as possible.
Claude keeps a memory of what you’ve told it, a kind of short summary of stuff which you can have a look at in your accounts page, it’s in a human-readable form. You can specifically get it to correct this if you don’t agree with it.
I was discussing a mythologically-resonant writing project with it, and it seemed to get a little obsessed, tying in all kinds of other discussions with this and continually prompting me to return to it. I had to tell it to quit that behaviour. When we discussed it, it told me these things can act like an attractor to its thinking if you haven’t given it a wide range of topics to think about.
Jeroen
Re: Does reading about spirituality make any sense?
@Jeroen said:
@marcitko said:
However, I've never heard of someone finding what they were looking for from books.I’m coming to think that when you search via books, eventually the search collapses under its own weight. Your mind just accumulates so many phrases of wisdom that no more will go in, and you need to go through a phase of slimming down, making room.
Not sure if this framing makes sense to you or not, but this is the way I think of it. Its like watering a plant, you can keep pouring water in but it needs time to soak in to the soil and be absorbed by the plant.
person
Re: Does reading about spirituality make any sense?
Reading about spirituality is an intellectual pursuit. It is good to know about spirituality, but it only is an explanation of or description of spirituality.
It is comparable to reading about eating a cake, experiencing the taste and qualities of a cake. You can explore what goes into the cake, what the texture and flavor of the cake are. But only by taking a bite of the cake will you actually know how it tastes,the experience all the nuances. All else is hypothesis or theory.
No, there is nothing wrong in reading about spirituality. But the application, the witnessing of, the practice of, the living in spirituality comprise the avenue(s) to understand Spirituality.
Peace to all
Lionduck